How smartphones are shifting the daily lives of older adults post-retirement in Kyoto and Kochi Prefecture, Japan.

Ageing with Smartphones in Japan examines sixteen months of ethnographic research following older adults, age fifty and up, in urban Kyoto and rural Kochi Prefecture, Japan as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement in the age of the smartphone. It attempts to answer what this transition means for friendship, gendered labor, multigenerational living, internal migration, health, as well as life purpose for older adults. This book closely investigates how the smartphone challenges gender-based norms and how older adults creatively navigate them. Using comics, drawings, and fieldwork sketches it also explores how they use digital visual communication to socialize with friends and family.

Laura Haapio-Kirk is a junior research fellow in anthropology at Christ Church, University of Oxford.

List of figures
Preface
Series foreword
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction
2 Experiences of ageing
3 Everyday life: gendered labour and non-retirement
4 Social relations: sustaining mutual forms of care (yui)
5 Crafting the smartphone: visual digital communication
6 Health: self-tracking and warm contact
7 Rural Japan: between decline and rejuvenation
8 Purpose in life: 'ikigai’ through the life course
9 Conclusion

Bibliography
Index